photography (1)

This is not really altogether about photography. Still, why do I take photographs, and do the photographs I take satisfy those reasons?

I was going to divide the motivations up into two, narrative and art; then I thought of a 3rd, to wit, technical. I think I could make a case for conflating technical and artistic, but I'm not sure it's going to be critical, so I won't try,at least not here.  Anyway, divisions into 2, 3, or 4 categories all feel equally natural. Curious, isn't it? Is that a feature of the world, or a feature of humans-talking-about-the-world? It's amazing to me how quickly philosophical questions raise their heads, and how easily, having done so, they get ignored. In fact, leaving out one - as a category - isn't at all fair to the monists, whom I suspect of being able to mount the most logical - if not the most useful - case. Once you start to play this game, you can quickly start making a case for five and seven (prime, like two and three), six (1+2+3, 1*2*3), eight (2 to the power of 3), nine (3 to the power of two), and I'll stop now, admitting that it's an arbitrary point to do so. I think once you get past six fundamental categories, you need to re-think what "fundamental" means.

I'm talking about photography, and I've divided the reasons for doing it into, technical, artistic and narrative.

We quickly move from three types of photo to seven, narrative-art, art-technical, you can expand the series.

I like taking pictures, and I would say that art is the dominant motivation. Narrative too, no doubt; I took plenty of photos at Christmas, but the narrative is generally burdened with art, minimally includoing composition. Digital photography offers the benefit/temptation of ex post facto composition, so art becomes, in a way, easier. I take the photos for narrative reasons, but I keep them for artistic ones; some are kept for narrative reasons. Perhaps digital photography invites the question, why do I keep photos, rather than why do I take them. Perhaps they are similar, but subtly different questions. The Cooks River series http://andrewsville.blogspot.com/2011/01/slightly-more-about-cooks-river-than.html is another example of the narrative/art combination.

But most of the time, I take pictures because something catches my eye as visually interesting. It turns out that what's visually interesting isn't that easy to photograph; often when I look at a picture I don't feel the same interest as I originally felt when taking the picture.

A couple of examples:

 Above is the shoreline at Roseville marina, taken from the restaurant (a narrative shot) and right is the umbrella under which I was sitting to take these photographs. What attracted me to take the picture on the right is the combination of the light on the underside of the umbrella from the ripples on the water with the illumination of the advertising slogan by the sun from the top of the umbrella. There is another feature which I noticed later, and that is the contrast between the engineered structure of the umbrella stand and the randomness of the ripples. There are some technical defects with the picture - handshake being the major one because the clarity of the ripple light is very important - but they are not what interest me here.

The problem is, can a viewer identify the relevant features? When I took the picture, I had both these pictures available to me, I could see the water and the ripples and the unobscured sunlight at the same time as the reflected ripples and the canvas-filtered sun. I had a lot of contextual information available. There is no way to take one photograph which combines these two pictures (I tried) because the light levels are completely incompatible. The top picture is probably around 1/512,  the umbrella around 1/64. That discussion is complicated by the way digital cameras juggle with ISO numbers from shot-to-shot, but the point remains the same; one shot can't combine the differing technical requirements of these two shots...but my mind can.

Enter one solution: technology. I haven't quite got the blending of the two images right, I don't think, it's a non-trivial exercise, but now you can at least infer the connection between the water and the pattern on the canopy.  (You probably need to double click on the picture to expand it to a size where the water is visible through the canopy.) The combining of the images also "excuses" the blur, which could now as easily be an artefact of the production process as a defect in the capture process. Even if I haven't quite managed the technology correctly, the principle is illustrated; image reproduction technology can, to some extent at least, replicate the mind's ability to be simultaneously aware of the environment at different scales.

However, that's not the only difference between the way we see the world, and the way we look at a picture of the world. Take this, one of my favourite pictures:

This was the only deviation from the red brick, green grass/shrub background in a block of four or five houses between home and the local supermarket. I'm very pleased with this picture because I think it captures the real attention-grabbing nature of the solitary explosion of colour; walking home with the shopping through suburban streets, the mind drifts, and then, wow... However, as with the pair of pictures above, it's been decontextualised; problems of scale mean that I can't present the four-house background without reducing the bloom to a size which, for all its uniqueness of colour, is not going to impose itself on the viewer as the focal point of the picture. No amount of composition will solve the problem of incommensurate scale. Again, I could use technology to superimpose the two scales, but it's a trick that could easily get boring with repetition. Perhaps there's enough brick-and-lawn in the picture to supply your imagination with the background. Or maybe, the picture stands alone and requires no context. That decision creates its own tension between the apparent realism inherent in the photograph and the fact that, decontextualised, the image is not actually real in any way. That tension is inherent in all photography, of course, not just mine. Photographic images claim an objectivity that is not justified.

If you're lucky of course, and scale and light are not a problem, depth of field is a traditional photographic technique for isolating the subject in its background.

Because the individual blossoms are small the shallow field allows a lot of the back and foregrounds to be present as well. (A different lens would have allowed me to intensify this effect further). Of course, this is not actually how I see the same vista myself from the front porch. Either the back, fore, or middle-ground are in focus, one at a time. My attention is unfocussed, but my vision is not.

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